The most fascinating online magazine EDGE has released the new year edition. It poses the grand question “What is your most dangerous idea?” to 199 people all of whom world’s great scientists. Last year it posed an equally thought provoking question of “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”.
If you ask me what is my dangerous idea, it is certainly going to be EVOLUTION. I have specially written it in capital case because I’m screaming that this idea is the grandest of all. In my opinion, evolution is just a miracle. This theory is still not well understood and I believe that many of the details are still unexplored. Evolution can explain anything! Anything. I even sometimes think that this theory is even more basic than laws of physics. Evolution made humans possible and humans discovered evolution. And now, we are manipulating evolution without knowing the full details of evolution. But the elegance of evolution still shocks me when I realize that the consciousness/awareness which I experience was not there on earth and all we had were atoms!
If you ask me about What I believe to true even though I cannot prove it, I’ll answer it as INTUITION. I have confidence that intuition exists and it is just the fact the we haven’t been able to provide the scientific explanation for it. If someday we discover the scientific basis of intuition that day we must be able to hack it to consciously predict future.
Have a look at Edge’s edition at: http://www.edge.org/q2006/q06_index.html
Paras,
You have to keep in mind, when writing about evolution, that the process itself is not really a “process”. Evolution has no particular goals; it does need seek to survive, procreate, learn, think, build, etc. Evolution is a mindless wrapper we use to understand natural selection.
You write about evolution as if it is a real process, which has a start, an end, an objective, and an output – but Evolution has none of those things. Evolution cannot be more basic than the laws of physics. The physics guides the chemistry of organic substances that interact with each other to produce cells and organisms.
Natural selection arose only when some organic compounds interacted in primordial soup — and when those compounds somehow created more of themselves. This was not the goal of the compounds, it just happened. Similarly, the ‘goal’ of evolution is not to survive or procreate.
It is weird to think that these things have no real purpose.